How JavaScript Became Popular – A Historical Overview

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In ancient history, Brendan Eich had a language design, and in today's world, JavaScript is a popular language implemented and used in many different places.

What caused the language to become popular? Was it the C-like syntax familiar to previous programmers? Did Netscape have enough control of the market to force it to be used? Or is there some deeper reason that JavaScript is popular and other languages are not?

Particularly, if you had to make a language as popular as JavaScript, what initial conditions would you need to recreate its growth in popularity?

Best Answer

I was commenting on an earlier answer, but it was getting big, so I thought I'd spin this out.

Any new language can only succeed if it capitalizes on an emerging frontier in computing.

Previous examples:

C for Unix
Objective-C for iOS
Perl and PHP for back-end Web 1.0
Python and Ruby for back-end Web 2.0
Java for the back-end Internet-enabled enterprise

To answer your question, JavaScript was the language for Netscape Navigator back when that was the dominant browser. Specifically, it was the language for dynamic front-end development.

The next big language will have to solve another frontier. There still seems to be a land grab in the back-end web development space. Plus, mobile computing isn't totally solved, despite Apple's current dominance. Also, there's the emergence of multi-core and cloud computing, which is something that many languages are attempting to capitalize on (like concurrent languages like Erlang and Go, or functional languages like Haskell and OCaml).

Entrepreneurs have an expression along the lines of, "find a someone on fire and sell him a fire hose". So if you want to introduce a new language, whose fire are you putting out? Every new frontier in computing brings a whole host of headaches; so supply some aspirin and you'll be golden.

Related Solutions

Has any language become greatly popular for something other than its intended purpose

Lisp. McCarthy originally specified Lisp in a paper to show that few simple notations are enough to build a turing complete language. He was surprised to find that Lisp could be implemented in machine code (Steve Russel did the first Lisp interpreter implementation). Lisp is widely used for AI programming.

JavaScript Asynchronous Programming – How Callbacks Work

It doesn't. Just taking a callback or passing a callback doesn't mean it's asynchronous.

For example, the .forEach function takes a callback but is synchronous.

var available = false;
[1,2,3].forEach( function(){
    available = true;
});
//code here runs after the whole .forEach has run,
//so available === true here

The setTimeout takes a callback too and is asynchronous.

function myFunction( fn ) {
    setTimeout( function() {
        fn(1,2,3);
    }, 0 );
}

var available = false;
myFunction( function() {
    available = true;
});
//available is never true here

Hooking to any asynchronous event in Javascript always requires a callback but that doesn't mean calling functions or passing them around is always asynchronous.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Has any language become greatly popular for something other than its intended purpose

JavaScript Asynchronous Programming – How Callbacks Work

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